380 million users– with that number, you will see LinkedIn as one of the largest social networks for colleagues and professionals. Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn gathers professional connections and provides the content to like-minded individuals.
However, LinkedIn is most likely overlooked and not utilised to its full potential. Some only use LinkedIn to look for new employees or connect with their colleagues.
In truth, LinkedIn is a platform where the audience can hone their expertise, target new leads, and establish your brand.
Although you can do these on other social media platforms, LinkedIn is the best network for businesses to create their professional community.
As it is the best place to cultivate audience interest and build a community related to your industry, you should follow the LinkedIn best practices to succeed in social media marketing.
Why is it Important to Apply LinkedIn Best Practices?
With millions of company pages found on LinkedIn, it is a smart move to use the platform to showcase your products, services, and business development. If you can effectively apply the LinkedIn best practices, you will build customer advocates and reach a broader audience scope.
An organisation used LinkedIn to increase their audience reach through engagement and community-building. At the end of the period, results show that they gained a 40% increase in their audience.
As you can see, LinkedIn has the marketing potential your business needs, incorporate LinkedIn best practices to turn your social network into a practical professional marketing resource.
LinkedIn Best Practices
You are building an online reputation for your brand on LinkedIn, a platform for professional users. You have to put value and market your brand the right way. Establish brand authority to make a good impression on your fellow entrepreneurs and target audience.
Throw Questions
Create a professional profile and do not make it look like an amateur. Complete each section on your information profile, include the correct contact information and a concise description of your brand.
Use your company logo for the profile image or header to let the audience recognise you. Although it is a simple task, you will be amazed by how brand profiles do not have enough information.
There is a difference between the primary and premium account. You can increase visibility and access more features if you have a premium profile. One of the premium features includes “Who’s Viewed Your Profile,” which will give you data of who is interested in your content, and you can reach out to them. Moreover, you will have 15 introductions for networking and referrals.
LinkedIn offers several membership plans that have their own set of features. You can even have a Content Marketing Score for business solutions. Measure the engagement with your posts, paid updates, pages, and groups. LinkedIn gives you detailed feedback and data to know the performance of your marketing efforts and improve them when necessary.
Encourage Employees to Share Your Brand Content
Statistics have shown some benefits of why you need to encourage your employees to share your brand’s content. These are the reasons:
✔ 3 out of 4 employees want to be part of the top of their company.
✔ 40% of the users check in LinkedIn daily.
✔ 42% of the company employees are more satisfied and successful when they are informed about the news and updates of the company.
However, some of the employees are held back for some reasons, and a study has discovered why their employees are hesitant to share their brand contents:
✔ 15.7% of the employees do not know which content they should share.
✔ 21.6% of the employees are not sure if their employers will share their brand content.
✔ 77.3% of them are not encouraged to share any brand-related content on social media.
If your employees are holding back from sharing your brand content, your business will lose in reaching more audience. Play smart by making your employees one of your brand ambassadors. Use their social powers to make your brand known on a professional network and get more eyes on your brand page.
Always Post Some Beef
Constantly update and attend on your LinkedIn page. Outdated profiles will do more harm—the same with every social media platform. You need to be attentive and responsive to your audience. You need to build a community within the platform, and it requires monitoring skills and attention.
Prevent your page from getting idle by following these helpful tips:
✔ Add videos: Professionals most likely visit a profile after they viewed a video.
✔ Always provide updates: Other than continuously updating your content to build your audience. Do not forget to update your cover photo, profile picture, descriptions and other business details.
✔ Engage with the audience: Join groups regularly to discuss with other users. Reply to messages or questions in the comment section. You can leave comments as well on other posts.
✔ Personalise your page: Users are not interested in entirely stiff pages. They want to experience genuine human interaction. Make them feel that every message or post they read from your brand has a human behind.
✔ Post career opportunities: Updating your career opportunities will invite more traffic to your website. LinkedIn hosts more than 40 million students and recent graduates.
✔ Post content frequently: You need to post on the best time or day on LinkedIn. Aim to publish them at the right time to reach more audience.
If you want to market your brand on social media, you have to communicate and control all platforms to gain connections. As a professional, you may want to build your brand reputation on LinkedIn. However, you need to do this in a humanistic and personal way to have your content read and viewed by your followers.
Do not hesitate to use the LinkedIn best practices to target your post, reach and engage with the right audience with the help of social media marketing tools. The right tools and practices will help you transform your audience and build relevant strategies.
Strategize Content
You can strategise how you publish your content with Pulse, a new publishing feature of LinkedIn. Although some are sceptical about the feature, there are good reasons why it is advantageous to use LinkedIn Pulse.
✔ Benefits in SEO: Pulse provides backlinks and indexable content from LinkedIn. If your Pulse content shows up in the search engine, then it is precious.
✔ Competitive: LinkedIn Pulse is getting ahead of the game. It is a great time to try and be under the spotlight of Pulse.
✔ Content Tags: You can tag your content after it is published. It will help increase the traffic after a long time. LinkedIn Pulse will help you have long-term benefits and searchability.
✔ More than Audience Target: Pulse allows users to know more about their audience demographics, which significantly helps their targeting. It lets you reach the audience who wants to read your content.
✔ Social Shares: Statistics show that top pulse posts have an average of more than 1,500 social shares within 48-hours. Most users with several followers tend to have the top posts, but landing there has benefits.
If your articles carry a great headline, talking about careers and development, engaging visuals, and under 1,000 words, it will do best on the LinkedIn pulse.
Measure Performance with LinkedIn Analytics
It is essential in every social media platform to track the performance of your marketing strategy. LinkedIn metrics will tell you about the overall engagement efforts:
✔ Audience: Determines if the post was sent to all the targeted groups or followers.
✔ Demographics of Visitors: You will understand your audience more. LinkedIn gathers their job title, company, function, location, and other important details.
✔ Clicks: Number of clicks your content, logo, or company name received.
✔ Engagements: Number of interactions divided by impressions.
✔ Followers Gained: Number of new followers gained from a sponsored update.
✔ Impressions: Number of times the post was shown to LinkedIn users.
✔ Page Views: Number of views the company earned from a specified date range.
✔ Unique visitors: The metrics show the number of users who viewed your company page.
Track and measure the success of your content and strategy on LinkedIn.
Final Thoughts
If you want to market your brand on social media, you have to communicate and control all platforms to gain connections. As a professional, you may want to build your brand reputation on LinkedIn. However, you need to do this in a humanistic and personal way to have your content read and viewed by your followers.
Do not hesitate to use the LinkedIn best practices to target your post, reach and engage with the right audience with the help of social media marketing tools. The right tools and practices will help you transform your audience and build relevant strategies.
